Gerry Spence on being a lawyer and a human being.

Gerry Spence is as good a lawyer and compelling an advocate as I have ever witnessed. He now has a blog. If you’re interested in being an effective lawyer, it’s a must read. If you’re interested in how life really works, it’s just as important. I am pleased too that href="http://gerryspence.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/defrauding-the-nation%e2%80%99s-lawyers/" target="_blank">his views on certain matters are similar to mine. Here’s what he writes:

The trial of a case, in its simplest form, is telling a story jurors can understand. Yet most lawyers are taught little, if anything, about communicating with others. They are taught to deny their feelings and, at last, have so long shielded themselves against their feelings that many find it nearly impossible to get in touch with them. Yet justice is a feeling and jurors (as do we all) make their decisions based on their feelings.

Most lawyers know little about classical literature and history, have never written a poem, have never painted a picture, have never stood before an audience and sung a song, have never been permitted to confess their pain or their love, and, in short, have been denied the stuff of personhood. One need not write poetry or paint pictures to be a successful human being. But some intimacy with the arts and the language and its use and with right brain functions of feeling and creativity are essential to the development of the whole person. Little wonder that lawyers, disabled by all of the stifling, mostly useless mental exercises they have suffered, have trouble relating to jurors, much less to the rest of mankind.